DANCING NEBULA

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Virality: international media coverage of The Global Square

Virality: international media coverage of The Global Square

by Jerome Roos on February 18, 2012

With Wikileaks and several other major players throwing their weight behind the project, a vaporware press release has made The Global Square go viral.

Ever since a group of activists released the original proposal for The Global Square on ROAR back in November, the collaborative endeavor to build an alternative peer-to-peer social network has generated considerable media attention. After featuring in a major story in Wired last year, a recent call for coders by our friends and partners at Wikileaks Central has once again propelled the project into the global public discourse.

The Global Square has gained traction in recent months as we have secured the support of an independent team of developers, coordinated by Ed Knutson of the Occupy movement in the US and Johan Pauwelse in the Netherlands. Pauwelse directs the Tribler P2P research team at the Technical University of Delft, which — with a budget of 26 million euros — is the world’s largest experimental research group working on self-organizing internet systems.

Meanwhile, we are being assisted by the legendary hacker and free-software activist Richard Stallman, who as the main author of several copyleft licenses, including the GNU General Public License — the most widely used free software license in the world — has agreed to contribute his GNU platform to the project. Furthermore, we are now drawing on the direct support of a number of hackers and free software activists associated with Wikileaks and Anonymous.

From April 27 until July 1, The Global Square will be featured at the 7th Berlin Biennale, where we will organize a ‘hackathon’ with leading online activists, coders, developers and designers from around the world to build the platform and ensure its resilience against attempted crackdowns. The decentralized P2P nature of The Global Square will make it virtually impossible for governments to neutralize the network without completely shutting down the Internet.

With Heather Marsh of Wikileaks Central (the Wikileaks-endorsed news site) and Pedro Noel of Take the Square (the international commission of the Spanish indignados) throwing their weight behind the project, we now have a powerful international coordination team in place. However, we remain in need of coders to help us turn dreams into reality and live up to the expectations currently being created by the international media.

For information on how to contribute to this exciting project, scroll down to the bottom of this page for more details — or contact Heather Marsh (our project spokesperson) here. Meanwhile, below you will find links to some of the international media coverage of The Global Square in recent months: